


Forever and For Her

by MatildaSwan



Category: Holby City
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Elinor obvi bc it's a, F/F, Fluff and Angst, Grief/Mourning, Heavy Angst, Mental Health Issues, Photographs, this is what happened when you take a crack!fluff idea and keep it canon compliant for mass angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-03
Updated: 2017-05-03
Packaged: 2018-10-27 05:27:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,760
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10802691
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MatildaSwan/pseuds/MatildaSwan
Summary: She assumed Guy installed one afternoon, with her out of the office and none the wiser to his antics. Until she'd sat down at her desk to tackle paperwork the next morning. She'd lent back in her chair, rolled her shoulders and looked straight ahead, found it staring right back at her in big bold letters.DON’T FORGET: YOU’RE HERE FOREVER.She never could tell if is was a legitimate threat or just Guy’s twisted version of a joke.





	Forever and For Her

**Author's Note:**

> Shout out to @biancagrieve for beta-ing and some headcanoning, @mxquill for beta-ing and [providing original post, @nervouspearl for the addition that made this whole fic possible, and @merlystreeeps for providing the tags that started it all ](http://matildaswan.tumblr.com/post/160231779541/nineteen-fifteen-nervouspearl-mxquill-has%0A)

Guy had installed it during one of her rare afternoons off—presumably sent Jesse to do it on a dare—and had the mess cleaned up afterwards to leave Serena none the wiser. **  
**

Of course she hadn’t registered the smell of drilled wood the next morning over the chemical tang of the ward. Stayed oblivious about it till mid way through her shift. Till she’d sat down at her desk to tackle paperwork and sip at her third piping hot cup of coffee that day.

She’d flipped a file closed, rolled her shoulders, leant back in her chair with a sigh. Stared straight ahead and there it was: DON’T FORGET: YOU’RE HERE FOREVER.

She never could tell if is was a legitimate threat or just Guy’s twisted version of a joke.

She’d ignore it outright for weeks, maybe even months, until Guy has dropped it into a conversation one day, in a comment about the new decor in her tiny office. Dropped it in almost kindly, as if its meaning would be lost in the ether. As if she’s never watched _The Simpsons_ with her teenage daughter.

She’d bitten back a retort—she wouldn’t let him get the satisfaction—smiled sweetly instead.

“It’s a wonderful motivator,” voice thick and honey sweet, “to be constantly reminded I’m so essential to this place that it needs me to stay forever. It’s brilliant, to find somewhere I belong so much that I’d never want to leave.”

She’d seen his nostrils flare and known she’d cut him that much sharper with a kind tongue than her snarling mouth ever could. He’d grumbled away and never mentioned it again but never took it down either.

But then again, neither did she. She simply grew so used to it she barely registered it was even there and declared AAU her kingdom.

*

Then Bernie moved into their office.

Serena walked into the office, a few days after suggesting Hanssen make Bernie co-lead, with a second cup of coffee in her hand to leave for Bernie. To leave it cooling until Bernie rushed in five minutes before her shift—her hair bedraggled and messy and herself itching to change into scrubs—to find yet another peace offering shared between them. Leave it for Bernie to rush in and neck at a skullable temperature, then shine Serena an appreciative smile and get to work, like she does now they work together.

Serena walked into the office to find Bernie already there, sitting on the edge of her desk with a coffee waiting for Serena this time, and staring at the plaque on the wall.

Serena took a second to be surprised Bernie that had gotten in before her, before breezing into their office.

“Morning,” she said as bright as she could manage.

“What’s this?” Bernie asks, voice somehow light and perturbed, pointing at the sign.

Serena followed the finger to the corner, eyes widening with realisation, and shook her head.

“Oh, that,” she stated, reaching forward to grab the coffee in Bernie’s left hand. “Just Guy Self’s version of joke, I think.”

Bernie turned to Serena: brow furrowed, mouth pursed, eyes stormy. “But, it’s _cruel_.”

Serena heard an edge of steel in Bernie’s voice, one she’d heard stories about cutting through theatres to slice at the egos of well respected surgeons, but had yet to hear herself. Until now. She remembered she isn’t the only one whose children grew through puberty and wondered whether Cameron or Charlotte was the bigger fan.

“Oh, no it isn’t,” Serena said with a flap of her hand. “It’s just a silly prank he pulled ages ago, I barely notice it anymore, certainly not enough to worry about.”

“But, Serena…” Bernie trailed off as Serena was struck, not for the first time, by how much she liked it when Bernie said her name. Liked the way she said Serena and how it always sounded right rolling off Bernie’s tongue. “It’s important, this place, we fix people here, we _save_ _lives_ here—”

“Yes, I know all that.” Serena waved her hand again, flicked it dismissively. This conversation was far too serious for some stunt pulled years ago. “It’s just a joke, and of course it’s in horridly poor taste because it’s _Guy_ , but you know what he’s like, I doubt he even remembers it’s down here,” she added, hoping Bernie would let this drop.

“He _should_ remember that it’s down here, with you.” Serena sighed, no such luck, turned to face Bernie now looking fully at her. “You’ve done brilliant work down here, Serena, you should be proud,” Bernie continued, voice full of praise but every bit as forceful as the steel from moments ago.

“I am,” Serena said, eyes flicking away from the intensity of Bernie’s face, and blushing lightly at her words. “I do love working here.” She didn’t mention that working here with Bernie, for even the briefest of times they’ve had so far, had made the ward seem so much brighter.

“Good, I’m glad,” Bernie said, seemingly satisfied, yet still turned back to the plaque to stare daggers at it. “Because being here, it shouldn’t be a punishment.”

“It _isn’t,_ Bernie.” She reached over to pat Bernie’s shoulder, reassuring. No response. She ventured a guess what’s gotten Bernie so worked up. “We’re both here because we want to be, aren’t we?” Bernie’s head turns towards her and she thinks she might understand. “I’m not trapped here, neither of us are, and _that_ thing,” she said, jerking her head. “It’s just a stupid joke.”

“It’s not a very funny one,” Bernie huffed out, finally relaxing, the tension of the office broke.

“True,” Serena acknowledged with a chuckle. “But it’s not one that I care enough to do anything about, so…” she trailed off with a shrug and watched as Bernie eyed the board like she just might care enough. “Look, if it bothers you that much, you’re more than welcome to do something with it,” Serena relented and Bernie peered at her through her fringe. “Just clean up the mess when you’re done, alright?”

Bernie grinned wolfishly and didn’t say a word and Serena assumed that was the end of that.

Serena smiled at the silence. Sipped her coffee, nodded her head thanks, and swept out of the office and onto the ward.

*

Then she walks into the office a week later to find the board plastered with photos of Elinor and Jason and two faces she doesn’t recognise.

She walks over to the corner of the office and drinks in the familiar sight of her daughter and nephew. Moves on to the other faces and realise they could only be Bernie’s children: one the spit of her mother and the other with a heavy dash of Marcus.

Serena smiles and stares until her eyes start to water and she’s memorised every last image. She is still staring when Bernie walks in fifteen minutes later.

“Hello, you!” The delight in Bernie voice at seeing Serena is obvious. She doesn’t turn towards the voice, keeps staring at the corner of the room. Lengthy pause. Bernie breaks it. “Oh, right, ah, do you like it?”

Serena turns to look at Bernie, sight still a touch hazy, and her cheeks rosy with joy.

“How’d you manage it?”

“Charlotte, actually,” Bernie replies, equal parts disbelief and delight. Serena raises her brows. “She, ah, she reached out to me, on Facebook, last week,” Bernie curls the corner of her mouth and in on herself a little. “Said she wasn’t quite ready to talk yet but wanted to have a way to contact me when she was and, ah, that she thought I might like a way to, see her without, actually seeing her.”

“That was very thoughtful of her,” Serena says diplomatically.

“It was, wasn’t it?” Bernie looks up from her feet, eyes blazing. “Anyway, I was flicking through her old photos and a face popped up a few times that seemed really familiar, only I couldn’t place it till I looked at her profile, and, umm…” Bernie pauses and beams bright. “It turns out that our two run in the same circles sometimes.”

“Really?” Serena starts at the revelation, delights at the idea that even if she and Bernie didn’t have this, that maybe—just maybe—they’d have met anyway, another way, maybe through their daughters.

Bernie nods vigorously. “So I did a little digging—”

“—stalking,” Serena interjects, smug and smirking. “I believe that’s what the kids are calling it nowadays.”

Bernie rolls her eyes. “ _Intelligence gathering,_ ” she corrects, head tilted to the side and teasing. “Anyway, I skimmed over some of her photos and I found a few I thought would brighten up the room, and Jason helped me choose the ones he thought you’d like best, and I added mine too because it seemed like a good use of the space.”

Serena smiles sweetly, thoroughly touched that Bernie would go to such lengths, to make something so thoughtful for them to share, and thanks her profusely.

Bernie ruffles under the praise, brushes it off as no big deal, and Serena doesn’t push. And if Guy seems a little jumpy around Bernie, the next time he comes down for a consult, Serena never pushes on that point either.

*

Bernie kisses her. She kisses Bernie. Then Bernie thinks it would be wiser not to kiss at all, so they don’t.

Until they do, again, just that once. Then Serena lets her heart fly out of mouth and watches as it ruins everything.

She says she’s falling, hopes Bernie will catch her, only she doesn’t. Bernie runs instead and Serena falls flat on her face and makes a fool of herself in the middle of the ward.

She locks herself in their office. Cries and calls herself fifty different kinds of stupid until the sobs slow to a few wet sniffles. She gets herself together and stands up to go back to work.

She notices her daughter smiling down at her out of the corner of her eye.

“I’m glad I haven’t told you yet,” she whispers as she walks over to the collage, because she’s just seen the spit of Bernie smiling back at her, and she can’t bear to look away even though she knows it isn’t her.

Serena can’t bear to take them down either, so she covers them with her coat until she leaves and finds a bundle of white fabric at home to keep their faces covered every day with Bernie still gone and herself a fool.

*

Bernie comes back, finally, and they kiss again, at last. Kiss in their office, near the door, against the desk, under their children’s smiling faces.

Serena is so happy she thinks her heart might burst.

*

She calls her daughter from the living room, looking at Elinor’s face in the framed photo she keeps on the bookshelf, smiling so hard she wonders if her cheeks might crack.

“I’ve got someone for you to meet,” she says, she says after she’s caught up on Elinor’s life, shaking with excitement.

Elinor squeals. “Oh, who is he?”

“Ah, _she_ , actually, is Bernie.” She smiles because she can, finally, say that Bernie is hers. She doesn’t notice the silence on the other end of the phone. “From work? I’m sure I’ve talked about her before but I know you two have never meet, and, I’d like you to meet her, properly, at Christmas.”

This silence, she does notice.  

“If you’re still coming, that is?”

“Yeah, sure, Mum, I’m still coming.” Elinor pauses and Serena counts the beats in her head. “Should I get her a gift or something?”

“Oh.” She hadn’t thought about that, to be honest. “Well, I suppose, but, I mean, only if you want to.”

Serena hears a hum, noncommittal response, and then nothing. She doesn’t know what to say after that so she say she’ll see Elinor at Christmas and gets a “sure” and “goodbye” in return.

She says “goodbye” and just manages to squeeze in “love you” before the call disconnects.

*

Christmas isn’t quite a disaster, but it comes close.

Elinor brings Bernie a gift and adds it, along with Serena’s and Jason’s, to the bundle under the tree in the living room when she arrives.

She doesn’t join Cam and Charlotte already comfortable on the couch and skulks off to her room instead. She only comes back down when Serena calls dinner served.

The table is quiet and tense when they sit and Cam suggests they pull Christmas crackers before eating. Serena and Elinor pull one and Ellie wins. Slips the crown on her head as she reads out the joke.

“What did the grape do when it got stepped on?” Her face drops the sneer enough to form a half smile and Bernie pulls out her phone. “It let out a little whine!”

The table cackles and Bernie snaps a photo and her phone clicks. Elinor turns towards the noise and Bernie sees the smile turn back into a sneer. It stays that way all through dinner and dessert and in every other photo taken that evening.

Expect the one on Bernie’s phone. It’s blurring and grainy and Serena doesn’t care. They gets it printed and add it to the centre of the board.

*

Elinor dies.

Serena’s heart breaks.

Bernie does not run.

*

Serena sits in her chair, mid-way through her first shift back on the ward, and stares at the wall. She stares at the corner of the office and sees Elinor stare back.

It used to make her happy, that board Bernie made, now it just reminds her that her daughter died on the bathroom floor of the same hospital Serena dedicated years of her life to at the expense of her family. She used to love this place. Now she hates it more than anything.

She stares at Elinor’s face plastered all over the the corner of their office until she can’t stand to look at her anymore.

Serena stands, walks over to the board, stares harder. Slowly, deliberately, begins to pull out the pins holding up her dead daughter’s smiling face. She catches the photos before they fall to the ground, leaves Christmas day in the centre, and puts the pins back where she pulled them from.

She goes back to her chair. Slips the pages into her handbag. Adds them to her shreds of ripped paper and never tells Bernie.

*

Bernie notices when the photos go missing, when she walks into their office, and sees the blank spaces in the corner where Elinor’s face used to be. She thinks she sees nothing but spaces where Elinor used to be these days.

She stares at the board, walks into the corner, and pulls the pins holding up the photographs of her own children down, and then Jason. Finally unpins the centre photo of her family. She slips all them into her coat pocket, pushes the pins back in, and carries their faces home with her.

She never asks Serena about the photos, because she already knows; does ask about the torn paper in Serena’s bag, because she doesn’t understand what that’s about.

She smiles when Serena says she’d rather spend the morning in therapy than curled up in bed with Bernie. At least she’s getting the care she needs from someone, even if she doesn’t want it from you, Bernie thinks, she’s cared for and supported and that’s all that matters.

She doesn’t realise how mistaken she is until it’s much too late.

*

Serena is gone and their office— _her_ office, Bernie reminds herself—is much too big now. It’s too big for just her and too bright with the lights on and too quiet with the door closed. But then it’s too dark with the lights off and too loud with the door open and too cramped whenever anyone else is in here with her.

It’s just never right, not the way it used to be, no matter what she tries.

At first she just tried to spend less time in there and more time on the ward. Only that left her aching from head to toe when she got home at night and still aching when she came back to the ward the next day because she’d spent all night aching for Serena.

She manages three days without a decent night of sleep before she knows she can’t keep this up without endangering patient care. She reschedules her surgeries till the next day and gets Raf back on AAU for the afternoon to cover her.

She spends the last few hours of her shift in the on call room hoping that a bed she’s never held Serena in might make it easier to miss her without aching.

She does sleep, in fits and bursts. Which is better than nothing, she thinks as she rolls over one last time and properly sleeps. But she wakes up crying and knows she was dreaming of Serena only to wake up alone and not even in a bed that smell like her. She knows this is even worse.

She stops by the chemist on her way home—she doesn’t want to explain herself to any of her colleagues and she’s not desperate enough to pilfer from the pharmacy supplies—and manages a solid eight hours under sedation; wakes up with wet cheeks but dry eyes and no fleeting glimpses of her dream. She reasons this is as much of a win as she can expect for the time being and gets out of bed to go to work.  

She makes an effort to balance her time more over the next few days. Managed to between reasonably well between the trauma unit, the ward, and their office, because she knows she’s let the admin side of things slide.

She lets it slide a little more, to border on critical, before she resolves to do something about it. Spend the last hour of her shift on paperwork but done nothing done because she sits at her desk and the office is still wrong because _of course_ everything in here reminds her of Serena.

There’s a bottle of wine, that Serena left on the roof, before she left Holby. Bernie made sure to keep it, to remind herself of Serena (how she could have lost her but didn’t; how Serena has left but might come back). She itches to smash it. She doesn’t even bin it. Bernie knows she’ll want it to be there tomorrow.

The paperwork reminds her of Serena and how they’d always split it unevenly in Bernie’s favour because Serena is kind and very good at admin and knew it’d never been Bernie’s forte (Bernie always paid her kindness back as best she could, with sweets and coffee and company and anything else she thought Serena would appreciate). The cabinet, the blinds, the walls, the door, the desks: every part of the office she’d ever pressed Serena against to kiss is still seared into Bernie’s memory and unequivocally connected to _her._

Even the sodding penholder reminds her of Serena, because it’s lived on Serena’s side of the desk since Bernie lost it one too many times and neither of them could stand never having a pen on hand anymore so Serena had rescued it and given it a home on her side of their office.

Bernie used to love this place, now she hates it, with a vengeance, because everything in her office reminds her of Serena and reminds her that Serena is gone.

Bernie sits in her chair, peers over the pile of patient files she needs to complete, to Serena’s side of the desk. She sees the empty space where Serena should be and the pile of paperwork she’s let build up there instead, and the piles of paper she’d let build up everywhere else hoping it would make the room less empty.

It doesn’t.

She gets up, sits in Serena’s empty chair, because if she sits in Serena’s empty chair she can’t see that it’s empty, and stares at the wall in front of her. Sees the corner of the wall in front of her and the board screwed into the wood that reads “DON’T FORGET: YOU’RE HERE FOREVER.”

As if she ever could. She promised Serena there would be something for her to come back to, if she ever wanted to return, so Bernie will be here forever, if that’s how long it takes until Serena is ready to come back.

She stares at the board and knows it’s right, knows why she’s doing this, know who she is doing this for. She knows who she is doing all this for: Her.

The corners of her mouth twitch despite herself and Bernie lets them. She lets herself smile and doesn’t stop, not until every pin is pressed firm through freshly printed paper and board. Even then she keeps smiling because now she has Serena’s face smiling back at her.

She steps away from the board and walks back over to Serena’s side of the desk. She thinks the lights are less glaring on this side of the room. She looks at the stacks paperwork crowding the desk and around the rest of the room and thinks it’s all closer to the right size now. She looks at the height of the piles and thinks they don’t seem as daunting anymore.

She tucks in Serena’s chair and walks around to her side of the office and sits in front of the only patch of clear space between their two desks. She pulls a file in front of her and flips it open. She looks at the pile still looming and cringes—she really does hate paperwork— and sighs heavily as she does her best to focus on the task at hand.

She grabs the pen and for a second it feels lighter in between her fingers than it did the last time she tried admin. She would have sworn that pen was made of lead. She frowns, adjusts her grip, and shrugs. She starts writing, thinks her hand moves easier than it did the last time, starts checking boxes, and is certain she’s moving faster than she does on the ward. She scrawls, almost freely across the pages, until she finishes the file with barely a blink.

She blinks at her hand and glances up. Blinks again, looking forward, and notices the dark of her computer screen. Notices the reflection on the screen, notices Serena watching her back from the corner of the room, and blinks back tears.


End file.
